Today I'm proud to announce something I have been working on for the past few weeks, My latest creation - Dropit, a new way to listen to your music, anywhere you are.
Currently, there are 2 main ways to listen to music on your iOS device - Transfer songs with iTunes or use a music streaming service. When I ask people about music on iOS, I constantly hear the following sentences: “iTunes is annoying”, “I don't want to use a music streaming service because it's app drains the battery 10 times more than the Music app” or “I don't want to use a music streaming service because it doesn't have the songs I want”. I personally don't transfer songs to the Music app, and use both Rdio and Grooveshark to listen to my music.
Rdio is great and it has superior social features and stations, it also has an app for Mac and iOS, but there is a feature it's missing - support for uploading songs not in available on Rdio(or playing songs not available in Rdio alongside my Rdio Collection) - If Rdio accessed a folder of music in my Dropbox and allowed me to play them with songs on my collection, It would be perfect. Grooveshark has this feature, it lets me upload songs to it, a lot of other people I know use it and I like it more but it doesn't have an app and it's HTML5 site doesn't support playing songs consistently so I use Rdio on my iPhone, iPad and Mac, and Grooveshark on the web.
The idea to listen to music from a folder in my Dropbox and my idea to treat music like podcasts, brought Dropit to life.
By managing your music as a podcast - There are many ways you could use Dropit. You can stream your songs or download them to your device, you can make a playlist or listen to just one song, you can share songs with friends or keep them to yourself, you can listen on any device no matter the OS version(you can listen on iOS 4 and you can listen in iOS 7) and you don't have to worry about syncing or backing up, because it's all in your Dropbox.
Here is how to use Dropit - On your computer, Download Dropit, unzip it to your Dropbox Public folder(if you don't have a Public folder, you can enable it here), enter your Dropbox Public folder token in the Dropit Settings, put songs in your Dropbox Public folder, run the Dropit Python script, copy the link to the created dropit.xml file, paste it in your favorite podcasts client (whether it's Instacast, Pod Wrangler, or even Apple's Podcasts app) and that's it, you are done.
I think Dropit 1.0 is a solid initial release version, but I already have plans for it's future. Here are a few features I'm thinking(not promising anything) of implementing:
- Showing song metadata like album name or album art
- Native iOS app
- Ability to trigger the script from your iOS Device
- Easier installation
- Mac App to manage the folder and run the script
You can get Dropit from here for absolutely free. Follow the instructions above and start enjoying your music, in your way.
If you have questions/ideas/suggestions/something to say about anything on the website, feel free to contact me via email, Twitter or App.net, Thanks for reading! :)